Multicore boom needs new developer skills
InfoWorld | at | by Mike
More than charity lies behind Microsoft and Intel's announcement this week that they will donate $20 million to a pair of U.S. colleges in the hope of spurring advances in parallel, or multicore, programming research, as a Microsoft research scientist readily acknowledged.
"There is a worldwide shortage of people experienced in parallel computing experience, for sure," said Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore computing at Microsoft. "One of the collateral reasons is to raise awareness in the academic community, because that's where the next generation of developers will come from." While for years, ever-higher clock speeds almost guaranteed that application code would run faster and faster, the rules are different for the multicore processors of today.